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Back in February, I wrote that MobileNotifier (a replacement notifications system for jailbroken iOS devices) would be the one thing that would make anyone want to jailbreak — and I stand by it. Months later, my iPhone is still jailbroken, almost solely so that I don’t have to go back to Apple’s built-in system.

It seems I’m not the only one who was impressed. Sometime in the last week or so — just days before they announce iOS 5, which is expected to come complete with a new (and hopefully less terrible) notifications system — Apple has pulled MobileNotifier’s developer, Peter Hajas, under their wing.

Whispers of the hire began a few days ago, when Hajas announced that he was “taking a break from MobileNotifier… for a while”. He couldn’t give a reason for his hiatus, but added that “it’s worth it. Trust me. If you look around hard enough, you’ll probably figure it out.”

So, a subtle quoting of Apple’s CEO — could be a hint, could just be a rather strange choice of references. Not really enough to go on, either way. Then Redmond Pie dug up the following tweet sent by Hajas, which has since been deleted:

@brittaahh I’m glad you like it! I’ll see what I can do :) I will be back for a few weeks, then I’m off to work in CA at a “fruit” company.

We asked a few of our Apple sources; while they’d heard his name around campus, none had actually seen him lurking about yet. So, we turned to the world’s favorite stalking-tool-in-the-cloud: Facebook.

Sure enough, Hajas has just added “Apple” to his list of employers, citing an Intern position beginning in May of this year:

So, why “Intern”? It’s par for the course with Apple. They seem to consider it something of a dry run; sort of their way of testing how well newbies mesh with the current talent and how skilled they actually are before giving them access to source code repositories or a fancy title. Of the many Apple iOS/OS X developers I’ve met over the years, every one of them started off as “Intern”.

Yesterday Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual on Twitter) was just a “an IT consultant taking a break from the rat-race by hiding in the mountains”, specifically Abbottabad in the Lahore, Pakistan.

But today he will become known as the guy who, while live-tweeting a series of helicopter flypasts and explosion, unwittingly covered the US forces helicopter raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound. And he knows it. Here’s a selection of his Tweets:

Because the iPad 2 launch had the fortitude to coincide with SXSW, Apple did well by the thousands of fanboys and fanladies that have descended upon the city and built a pop up shop at 6th and Congress.

We braved the line today and got the chance to speak to the lucky man who bought the very first iPad 2 sold in Austin, Texas. Austin native and conference attendee “Sweet” John Muehlbauer (an event planner at Revolving Events) got to the store at 5:30 am and endured a 10 1/2 wait to get his hands on the sweet sweet tablet.

While the line was wrapped around the block when we got there, Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan reports that there was still a plentiful supply of iPad 2s this evening, with an estimated wait time of 15 minutes.

Watch Muehlbauer walk us through his new purchase, above. Highlights: “Walking in the store with all the excitement of the Apple people was like Christmas and Saint Patricks Day and Halloween rolled into one” and “It seems exactly the same way but does seem a little faster than the first one.”